Decreasing Returns…

I know you have all been just about passing out with anticipatory breath-holding – waiting to see what might become of the social experiment (link to an earlier post) aspect of my weight loss journey. Wait no longer…here it is.
As a part of my term paper I am working toward a proposal that will include an auto-ethnography of my experiences in around weight loss. Since the course is focused on objects it will be goal to explore the topic through the lens of some groups of objects. One of the main groups will be food objects. Another will be the body itself. Another might include several ‘accessory’ objects including clothing, weighing devices, medicine, exercise equipment. My goal will be to use these objects as “good to think with” (to riff on Levi-Strauss’ discussion of totemism). Not my dear friend (he says blathering on into the ether) in order to come up with some sort of definitive position on the weight loss is perceived in society or what potential function it serves. Rather I am interested in reflecting on the questions that arise out of my own experience along side some interesting readings I am and will be doing as I journey through it.
Now as you might already know – I have already lost a fair amount of weight so it might seem odd that I start so late into the process. I think that my tardy arrival might actually be legitimate for the following reasons: 1. I have no clue when I started this thing back in June whether I would actually lose any substantial weight at all 2. It hasn’t been until recently that the social distinctions have become apparent to me 3. This is when it fit into my studying schedule.

Let me go back to that first reason for a while…I suppose it might have been interesting to writing this autoethnography from the perspective of someone wanting to lose weight. In fact that narrative might have yielded a fascinating observation of how the imperceptible evidences might have begun to shape a new identity for me. At the same time, I get the sense that it is not until something significant has occurred with regard to weight that there really is any recognizable evidence to think with. So in a really odd way it is the very non-existence of a significant amount of the former mass of my body which no longer resides on my person that I am able to think about weight loss at all. It’s almost like the object that I am using to think with is no longer a material object – ooooh that has potential Bat Man!
So here is what you are going to get…
a fairly daily posting of some of my thoughts for the day – I will warn you that I will be referring to texts and readings that I am doing that might not be easily digestible – where I can I will cite their online sources but if you have further questions feel free to ask…or comment…
you will also get a daily weigh in. That’s right I will update you on my weight that day. I am working down toward 100lbs and I am roughly 15lb away from that target.

Feel free to comment – I will especially appreciate your own reflections and questions about this topic – and as always (as I am sure many of you do anyway) feel free to not pay attention to this at all. I say that because in this world of endless facebook photo albums and other monotonous collections I would hate to be reason for any more of your time being wasted on this triviality…

Recovery or revolution?

I admit that I admire a professor who places a provocative text into my hands as a requirement of the course he is teaching. I especially admire a professor who has the theoretical fortitude to force the reading of material that does not necessarily support, as so much propaganda, his own inestimable positions. Such is the case with Bill Ramp’s choice of Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. It would be easy to write off this book as just another luddite tome advocating a resistance against the encroachment of ‘technology’ and its contingent value system – namely the alienating predisposition of capitalist schema. Crawford is far more ambitious than that and to that end the work is commendable indeed.

Like Dwight Garner’s NYT review describes,

Many of the ideas in “Shop Class as Soul Craft” are deeply resonant. Mr. Crawford mourns that shop classes were largely eliminated from American high schools in the 1990s because they are expensive to run, and sometimes dangerous. He takes this as a symptom of a larger problem: We have, as a people, lost our fundamental manual competence. We can no longer fix our own stuff, and we are increasingly steering our kids “toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

His book, he writes, “advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair.”

What Crawford successfully argues is a recovery of the devalued nature of skilled manual labour in western society which, according to his convincing rhetoric serves to dehumanize individuals into ghostly work that is reduced to insignificance. His argument is immediately amenable to all the common luddite advocacy against advancing technology and the all-too-common-place theoretical position that postulates that capitalism with a human face might be possible. On the face of it one can easily get succumb to his throttle twisting rhetoric that seems to reject the way the blinkered pursuit of all things ‘technologically advanced’. He certainly advocates a return to the idea that we should be able to lay our hands on the stuff that we interact with daily.

It was exactly this type of mentality that led me to attempt to build my own computer a few years ago. I was frustrated by the fact that my machines seemed to invariably breakdown (whether to the onslaught of viruses or hardware dysfunction) I resolved to crack open the box that gave source to my frustration and learn how to build one for myself. I learned a lot of stuff about how a computer works. In the process of building my first three or four units I encountered numerous problems whose solution gave a great deal of satisfaction. But I think that the only thing that this venture really gave me was a mediation for the anger that frequented by disposition when something would go wrong. It put me in direct connection and control over a piece of machinery that seemed to have mystical power over my very existence. I would love to report to you that from that time on computers have ceased to be a source of pain and concern in my life. I am sad to report that a recent bout of spyware saw me returning not once but twice to some eager lip-licking ‘technicians’ who gladly exorcized the demonic rascals from my hard drive. It was not that I was powerless in my own ability – it was just that even with my advanced detailed knowledge of the machinery and its essential working structures. And even with the deductive (rudimentary as it is) skill in diagnosing the diseases which help my machine captive I chose to give over my advanced cognitive skills in order to save myself the drudgery of fixing it myself.

In the same way Crawford seems to all too conveniently avoids the idea that while he IS the one who fixes rare bikes with cunning and skill –there are many who for a myriad of reasons have abandoned that as a notion worth engaging in. In so doing he also missed an important point about his argument. It does not go far enough.

Sure he can recover out of the ghostly shadows the value of manual labour but only to the point of fetishsizing these other forms of work within the current system of operation. Its true that skilled manual labour needs to be revived as valued. --That the old ways of doing things are important and necessary…

it is not uncommon to see people abandon the conventional methods of face to face interaction – lets say by telephone – in favour of cryptic facebook messages or ominous text messages open to whimsy of pluralistic emoti-lante-ism (emotion + vigilante + ism --- to borrow a Shrute-ism).

BUT… what we need to realize is that somewhere buried in this hog-riding rhetoric is a certain longing to see past values restored to their proper position within a system that once gave it honour. It’s the system that requires adjustment/fixing/repair not the ‘mechanics’ of some yesteryear nostalgic repertoire of frames that might only serve to reinforce the perpetually problematic ethos of our current free market ideology. We need a different way to imagine the idea of value. We need a different way to image the idea of significance.

Why is it for instance that the poverty-stricken Haitian boy slapping an old bike tire down the dusty road lives with a peculiar sense of joy, generosity and gratitude that is blaringly lacking in the youth of our ‘more advanced’ society? His engagement with a less technologically advanced world and his enjoyment of more simple pleasures is evidence of the need to reconsider our ideas about value – our ideas about worth and work… But we are wise not to think that if we could merely get our own children to play marbles in the dust or carve their tops that this would be enough. We must be driven beyond these superficialities toward the type of revolution that reframes our world toward ideological positions that refuse to accept that individual worth can be evaluated, reduced, or judged according to the ability of the individual to produce products or labour that meets the vacuous arbitrariness of our modern world of work. 

Healthy vs UnHealthy

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I am an immigrant…

I am an immigrant

I am here to take your job away from you

I will sponge off your tax dollars

I will soak up your pension

I will crowd the hallways of your hospital

I will force you to accept my outlandish religious views

I am an immigrant

I came here to screw you over

I want to take over your culture

I want to run your political institutions

I want to make your country as much like my own as possible.

Because…

The country I came from was perfect

no war

no poverty

no bigotry

no sexism

no religious restrictions

I could wear whatever I wanted to wear

I could pray to whomever I want to pray to

I could talk openly about my beliefs without anyone threatening to put me in jail

I was never persecuted because of my dialect or color of skin

I never saw my entire village wiped out by genocidal maniacs

I never had to worry about my family starving

I never watched my children running naked through the streets.

My country was perfect

I am an immigrant

plain brown plain

Is this dream responsible?

Does the bird fly because it can or because it is supposed to soar?

Does a worm crawl because wings are the whores

of lofty decadence? Does the lion kill because it has found the best meat?

Does the zebra find it a patriotic feat

to stand against the plain brown plain - Black and white and eat’n

Is this dream virtuous?

Does the fish swim in schools

like conformity’s fools

deciding the tools

of individuality are less appealing than keeping the rules?

And do the stubborn mules

find compliance to suit their nature best

Less of me…

As many of you know by now, I am in the process of becoming substantially less. That is to say that the substance that makes up my corporeal essence is decreasing in mass and volume. There are two usual ways that this is noted in popular discourse – in weight (specifically -- kg’s or lb’s) and in size (specifically in the circumference measurement around one’s waist). In honour of these conventions I testify that as of the writing of this I am 70lbs lighter than I used to be and I have dropped 6/7 inches in the circumference around my waist. All this since the first of June.

Dear reader, I know you are tempted to insert your congratulatory notes here or even boldly call me to wish me well in my endeavour. Please refrain from doing so. As you will learn shortly, I doubt that congratulations are entirely appropriate even if they would make me feel good.

Most people want to know what I am doing to lose this weight. So here is the regimen. I am taking a prescription of Meridia which is NOT an appetite suppressant but it works to send signals of satiation sooner to the brain which helps me to eat much less than I routinely have over the years. Those of you with neurotic predilection to discover the damaging effects of pharmaceuticals will within a few click realize that this drug has a controversial history. None of the problematic symptoms have occurred in my case – I have only improved in all of the indicators of health (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.) So again your well-intended warnings are largely unwelcome. On its own the drug has been instrumental in causing my weight loss but perhaps not in the way that you might expect. Yes I do feel fuller faster and consequently eat much less food – approximately 750 calories/day (or one small meal). However, the drug has acted in another way. It is an expensive medication even with an insurance plan without which it would be impossible to afford. Realizing that a financial outlay was going to be necessary has motivated me to work at my weight loss more diligently. I spend roughly between an 1 1/2 and 2 hours a day in cardio and weight training. That is how the pounds are coming off.

Not very many people are truly interested in why I am losing weight. I suspect this is largely because they assume that I have chosen one of the common public discourses on weight loss as my motivation (a.)gain a more acceptable body image in conformity with public notions of sexiness, fitness, and other general features of attractiveness b.) reduce my weight to reduce my risk of serious health problems in the future c.) some variation on the theme of mid-life crisis) For me the public discourse on weight loss seems to reflect both the superficiality and neurosis of our popular culture. That is not to say that is a weak or meaningless discourse at all. Quite the contrary it is very powerful and provocative. I can already tell that acquaintances treat me differently. They predictably speak about my improved looks and then in more extended conversations they move toward reinforcements of health concerns. So predictable have these topics become that it has become a veritable annoyance to be in public. However, I have begun to treat this experience as a social/sociological experiment. So now these predictable responses serve as a fascinating outline of how the public discourse around weight loss is reinforced. I may speak more on this in the future as it is a potential topic for my term paper this semester…

My actual motivation for losing weight is to prove a point. Namely, that I cannot eat the same way most people eat and maintain an acceptable body weight/figure. I was not eating anymore food than an average person eats. In fact I know that my wife routinely used to eat more than I did (before I started losing). Many of my friends ate much more than me and ate a diet that was substantially less healthy. Sure I probably ate too much right before bed etc – but compared to other around me I could not usually be accused of over eating as far as others are concerned. The only time I was able to maintain a healthy weight was when I was 19 years old working 14 hour days in construction and eating basically one small meal a day. I have made that claim for years and yet for the most part I don’t think that people believed me. The reason i was gaining weight was that I was eating an average amount of food according social conventions and was not nearly active enough to take any weight off. So now I am proving my point. Obviously, the most difficult part of this task has been to break out of the social conventions that typically form around the consumption of food. Thankfully Char has stopped asking me if I am sure I don’t want more to eat. But then she can already see my point. It is hard to go to someone’s house for a meal and not participate in the social aspects of food. But that too has been a unique opportunity for me to reflect on some of the social conventions that exist beneath the surface of our interaction with food.

Obviously, it has been great to be able to be more active, to fit into clothes I thought i never again would and be able to do things I had not been able to do. These are all awesome benefits of my weight loss – ones I would like to maintain.

There is a surreal aspect to all of this as well. I am still whole and complete (several caveats could be discretely mentioned here but…). There is the equivalent of a fourth grade student missing from my physical form. That is substantial yet it almost feels like I should have some residual evidence of the weight that has gone  - but it is as if it has disintegrated. So that in many ways the bathroom scale forms the main way that I can measure my own achievement. This too becomes an interesting place for social evaluation since there is clearly a connection between the abject known as a scale and one’s ability to measure the decreasing body size that might otherwise be virtually imperceptible.

So there you go. We’ll see where this experiment ends up. I appreciate your encouragement and would love to hear from anyone else who has any reflections on the way weight has affect their social interactions.

The Communism of Wal-Mart

Up front I have a revulsion toward the idea of walking into a Wal-Mart. So it was that my stomach was dancing a slow waltz with my uvula as I stepped out of my mini-van and approached the doors of said establishment. My repugnance is based largely on how Wal-Mart has come to represent the iconic evils of corporate capitalism. I know that my own aversion to this particular retailer is over-drawn in light of the myriad of corporate retailers who employ similar if not worse practices. Nevertheless my feelings are not appeased in anyway by the clear evaluation (in my ever so unrefined sense of taste) of their goods as largely being subpar in quality. (When’s the last time you heard someone say, “boy that ___________ that I bought at Wal-Mart has sure lasted a long time”)

It was precisely at the moment when all those ideas were flooding my mind in the gleeful criticism that I was revelling in, that a curious thought approached the waiting line of my elucidatory mental rollercoaster thrill ride. As I watched what seemingly mindless dupes giving in to their most base carnal materialism, I was struck by a conviction of another sort. Scanning the blank-eyed senior in the blue vest at the door it occurred to me that perhaps I was entering the beguiling bastion of communism itself. You’d be justified in noticing the incredible irony and even ludicrous nature of this idea.

Wal-Mart consistently finds favour in the annals of Fortune 500 as a respected company. It is lauded as one of the few global corporations that has not suffered in the blustery winds of recession. It likely that my mutual funds are deeply invested in Wal-Mart (as are many investment vehicles). Clearly this company is a wide representative of the glory of the free-market system entrenched in capitalism’s doctrinal evangelism. This company has managed to garner a meagre 60% of market share in many retail domains. This without succumbing to the pressures of unionization of it employees.

So how does the communist label fit? We’d like to believe that because under one expansive roof we can such a wide variety of products we have the opportunity to exercise democracy over our purchasing choices. But when this one corporation can negotiate pricing and production deals with manufactures that are un-paralleled in the rest of retail. When its retail dominance can not only influence the price but the brand and constitution of the products being produced and then is successfully able to market these products to consumers in such a way that any other competitor must account for the price and type of good that Wal-Mart produces – is that not essentially what a successful communist system is able to do? When the this store can enter a community a displace other viable enterprises in months – is this also not the same sort of conformity of service and access that is typical in communist ideals? If a corporation can dictate to its employees the terms of their employment in such a way as to keep them needing the welfare funding of governments (average Wal-Mart yearly wage is 15000) is that also not precisely the kind of state-dependence that Lenin and Stalin wanted? And if this corporation has the ability to reach beyond its head office to dictate the terms of production and manufacturing in developing nations controlling development of manufacturing and production technologies and systems – do we also not see the grand agenda of communist control that history reminds us of in the soviet project…?

Now not only was my stomach upset but my brain was hurting as well. Ding ding ding ding beep beep beep beep bing bing bing…..

We might do well to imagine ourselves as less...

this could be me?

Altruism: a useful fiction?

If we agree that an altruistic act is characterized as the unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others. Is it really possible to be altruistic?

On the surface one might suggest that it is possible. When I go shovel my neighbour's driveway when he is terminally ill with cancer – that could be considered truly selfless. Right? I mean he has does not have the ability to repay me for it in kind and if I refuse to accept any other sort of payment for the work then I have indeed met the obligation of a truly altruistic action. Right?

Could it be that there is more to it than that? Is it possible to think about every human action in the same way that Newton thought about physical objects in motion? If this is true than we should be able to construct something akin to a relational action equation with a zero SUM. What happens on one side of the relationship must be balanced with an equally significant action on the other part.

So I mow your lawn when you are out of town and you mow mine when I am out of town. This then in mathematical terms is a reciprocal relationship. You can easily see how we can put an equal sign between these two actions. But what about the snow shoveling scenario? It would seem that the two sides of the relationship are not equal since I will not be getting anything in return for my action. But is that really true?

If I do something for my neighbour, I still actually get some things coming back to me across that equation even if they do not come directly from the person I am serving. The first thing I get back is a good feeling. Add to that the idea that by doing this action I am meeting my obligations to my religious beliefs which add to my sense of accomplishment (in some religious systems these acts of kindness might qualify me for greater eternal rewards as well). Not only that this action gives me a better standing in society. When my neighbour’s kids come over and he mentions that I did this nice thing for him well they are impressed and feel they owe me something. Even if I refuse to accept anything – they will talk to their friends and family and in the end my personal rating go up. I have more money in the relationship bank. Now in fairness if I did it completely anonymously no one would know that I did it so that social capital would not increase for me.

But even in the case of the anonymous giver – the gift itself can be enough payment. Think of the anonymous donor of a million dollars to a hospital. Does she get increased status? Well it would seem not except that when it comes to being sick this person will ultimately benefit from the increased capacity of the organization to which they have given money. So we can’t say that the action is disinterested or that there is no return on investment.

If I do something out of a sense of duty – it means that I accept that there is already a deficit in my relational account. I accept that I owe society a debt of selflessness for what I have already received. Duty works like a mortgage in this case and it forces us to accept that we are inherently in a deficit position toward others. Duty constructs the self as a perpetually deficient entity that necessarily needs to repay the debt which the self has accrued – naturally.

So maybe there is no such a thing as a truly altruistic action. Maybe real selflessness is a fiction that works conveniently to reinforce our sense of duty toward each other which in turns us into depreciated goods in constant need to redeem our deficit…